Noodle People

An art style in which characters are drawn with exaggeratedly long, thin torsos and limbs. This can look rather odd if animated. The term was coined in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, although the term has also been picked up by the Anime and Manga fandom. Despite the floppy connotations of noodle-ness, character designs using this aesthetic frequently tend to be angular and pointy, especially around the joints (and, in anime and manga, possibly also the chins).

This tends to take one of two main forms:

One step up from stick figures, where the torso has some thickness and heads and extremities have more realistic detail, but the arms and legs are essentially lines. This seems to be rather popular in gothic and emo art, and may apply to all the characters, or just one or two. Example: Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

A style based on fashion illustration, where the characters are impossibly slender and long-limbed, but otherwise have more-or-less normal anatomy and musculature. Especially common in Josei manga. More likely to apply to the entire cast (or at least the attractive characters). Often overlaps with Bishounen and/or Bishoujo. Example: Doumeki and Watanuki from xxxHolic.

This style is most noticeable in CLAMP works xxxHolic and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. Though not a style used in their earlier works, the stereotype has already set in, with these two being their most popular recent works. To a lesser extent, it's still there in their older stuff (e.g. Tokyo Babylon), which has occasionally been toned down due to the difficulty of animating. It's just closer to being in line with the rest of anime's skinny, skinny waifs. It also turns up in Code Geass, which is not terribly surprising, considering its characters were designed by CLAMP.

Monkey D. Luffy is drawn in this style. Additionally, he has an elastic body, making him a noodle person on two levels. His noodliness seems to be inversely proportional to the seriousness of the scene. He has a much more defined shape and visible musculature whenever he's kicking butt, but in very comedic scenes he is so much of a noodle person that he doesn't always even have elbows or knees. However, Sanji is pretty much always a noodle man and Usopp is always a puppet/stick man (except recently when he got really fat, and then after the Time Skip where he got fairly muscular). As well as new crew member Brook, though only because he is only a skeleton now

Justified (?) during the fight with Kalifa of CP 9. Her Awa Awa no Mi (Bubble Bubble Fruit) gave her the ability to "clean off" power. It also smooths out the curves of the target's body, making them look very noodle-like.

Then again, they are cyborgs whose biological parts were created by merging the DNA of both humans and Eldritch Abominations, so them not strictly following the laws of nature was probably unavoidable.

More a case of the cast being expies of Lupin III's, Spike's legs are especially drawn to resemble his predecessor's. Ed, having no previous incarnation, is the one who is pure noodle for noodle's sake.

Since author Kaoru Shintani once worked as an assistant to Leiji Matsumoto, the characters of Area 88 tend to be rail-thin. Especially noticeable with women and Saki and Shin.

Claymore: all the Claymores, and many of the other characters who aren't specifically meant to be fat or hugely-muscled.

Kouta Hirano of Hellsing does something like this; his characters tend to be very streched. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, his thick-lined, angular style still give limbs a lot of weight despite their elongated proportions.

The drawings of Hajime no Ippo evolved into a variation of this over time: during fights, the characters have a muscular torso but impossibly thin limbs. Especially glaring during the fight between Itagaki and Saeki, or in Mashiba's later fights.

Jhonen Vasquez as said above, utilizes noodle people. This is especially evident in his comics Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Squee!, and I Feel Sick. It's less noticeable in Invader Zim, where most of the characters are either children or very short, but it can be seen at times when adults appear. Apparently Happy Noodle Boy himself doesn't count.

Aeon Flux, big time. The long limbs and large chests of the characters in the show were perhaps due to the action being set on a planet, not very Earthlike, with low gravity and thin air. Admittedly, that's probably an Epileptic Tree, but a petit mal one.

Monster Buster Club: Everyone, excluding the fat people, pretty much define this trope. I mean, just look at them.

Coraline has several examples. The titular character is as thin as a rod, but several other characters, like Wybie and her father, are squat and rotund. The Other Mother starts out with the (nice) legs of Coraline's real mother but gradually turns into a grotesque spider-like creature.

You can create your very own Noodle Rocker in Rock Band just by setting the weight slider to minimum in the character creator. It'll give even the shortest characters skinny little stick-limbs, although only the ones who're also tall get the full Noodle Person effect.

This isn't really possible anymore in Rock Band 3; the character creator was overhauled to be more detailed and realistic, so the characters can't be quite as skinny as they were in the previous games. Also, all the men have fairly bulky shoulders and upper torsos even if they're at the minimum for weight and muscle, although the female characters can still be quite twiglike.

I.M. Meen is very gangly. All the better to dance around and sing about clever children, I suppose.

The Grey Jacks in Resistance are giant spindly aliens; the Grims somewhat fill this role in the sequel.

Miror B. of Pokémon Colosseum fame. He's by far the thinnest character seen in a Pokémon game, and is about two heads taller than the main character. The thinness of his arms/legs/body makes his absolutely massive afro even more comical.

Pretty much all of the player characters in more recent versions qualify as well. Brendan from Generation III, Lucas from Generation IV, and Hilda from Generation V are particularly scrawny-looking.

Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog has this design, in contrast to all the other human characters, who are more realistically proportioned. Both the frogs also take on this proportion when standing upright, but that's because they're frogs.